In recent trends, portable computing devices are becoming thinner due in part to user demand. Conventional computer housings having thin profiles are typically made of injection molded materials that may limit the use of alternative fabrication techniques for increasing, decreasing, or varying stiffness. For instance, as laptop form factors become thinner, it may be beneficial to preserve structural stiffness in particular regions of shell housings to improve device resiliency against damage, while reducing structural stiffness in other regions of the shell housings. Further, it may be beneficial to uniformly increase structural stiffness of shell housings, while maintaining thin wall form factors of laptops. Unfortunately, conventional computer enclosures are increasingly inadequate due to their essentially thin shell housings without any internal mechanism for varying stiffness at particular regions across the shell housings. As such, there exists a need to improve integrity and resiliency of computer housings by varying strength and stiffness of these computer housings.